Hide

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

If you have a new feature suggestion or find a bug, please get in touch via http://commandlinefu.uservoice.com/

Get involved!

You can sign-in using OpenID credentials, or register a traditional username and password.

OpenID
or
Sign in Register

First-time OpenID users will be automatically assigned a username which can be changed after signing in.

Hide

Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for:

Hide

News

2011-03-12 - Confoo 2011 presentation
Slides are available from the commandlinefu presentation at Confoo 2011: http://presentations.codeinthehole.com/confoo2011/
2011-01-04 - Moderation now required for new commands
To try and put and end to the spamming, new commands require moderation before they will appear on the site.
2010-12-27 - Apologies for not banning the trolls sooner
Have been away from the interwebs over Christmas. Will be more vigilant henceforth.
2010-09-24 - OAuth and pagination problems fixed
Apologies for the delay in getting Twitter's OAuth supported. Annoying pagination gremlin also fixed.
Hide

Tags

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

Commands tagged expansion

Commands tagged expansion from sorted by
Terminal - Commands tagged expansion - 5 results
bind '"\C-e":"\eb `which \ef`\e\C-e"'
2011-01-26 16:11:52
User: jennings6k
Tags: bash which expand completion bash tricks PATH expansion
0
Up
Down
expand a program-name into an absolute path on the bash command-line, using ctrl-e

Tested with bash v4.1.5 on ubuntu 10.10

Limitations:

as written above, only works for programs with no file extention (i.e 'proggy', but not 'proggy.sh')

because \eb maps to readine function backward-word rather then shell-backward-word (which

is unbinded by default on ubuntu), and correspondingly for \ef.

if you're willing to have Ctrl-f and Ctrl-g taken up too , you can insert the following lines

into ~/.inputrc, in which case invoking Ctrl-e will do the right thing both for "proggy" and "proggy.sh".

-- cut here --

\C-f:shell-backward-word

\C-g:shell-forward-word

"\C-e":"\C-f`which \C-g`\e\C-e"

-- cut here --

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
rm *.txt <TAB> <TAB>
2010-11-04 13:58:15
User: boschi
Functions: rm
Tags: wildcard glob expansion
23
Up
Down
prevent accidents while using wildcards

alternative for "echo rm *.txt". Just doubletab the command you are willing to use and it will show you the affected files.

Show sample output | Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
echo rm *.txt
2010-10-27 07:26:26
User: alperyilmaz
Functions: echo rm
Tags: echo wildcard glob expansion
11
Up
Down
prevent accidents and test your command with echo

if you're using wildcards * or ? in your command, and if you're deleting, moving multiple files, it's always safe to see how those wildcards will expand. if you put "echo" in front of your command, the expanded form of your command will be printed. It's better safe than sorry.

Show sample output | Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
2010-08-10 12:26:43
User: Marco
Tags: windows loop batch dos expansion
-1
Up
Down
MS-DOS only: Enable variable expansion from inside of FOR loops with !varname!

Usually the MS-DOS cmd.exe processes in the whole FOR loop as one command and expands each var like %varname% in before (except the loop var of course).

This command enables expansion of other vars than only the loop var during the FOR loop. The syntax of the var to expand is then !varname! inside the FOR loop.

Use command

endlocal

to end the setlocal command.

E.g. (only works from batch files, not from commandline directly):

@echo off

setlocal enabledelayedexpansion

FOR %%A IN (*) DO (

set file=%%A

echo !file!

)

endlocal

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
echo ${fullpath##*/}
2010-07-21 22:35:29
User: quincymd
Functions: echo
Tags: find basename expansion
9
Up
Down
Isolate file name from full path/find output

Quick method of isolating filenames from a full path using expansion.

Much quicker than using "basename"

Show sample output | Comments (6) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate